Like a Hitchcock horror movie: Geraldton’s screaming vandals ruffle feathers

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the old Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds. Widely criticised when it came out in 1963, it is now something of a cult classic. It tells the story of thousands of birds that invade a coastal town in California called Bodega Bay. The birds start to attack people who live in the town and eventually they take over. Bodega Bay is a real place. It’s somewhat smaller than Geraldton but in the movie, at least, it has just as many intriguing characters. It is true that there is a significant bird population around Bodega Bay, mainly seagulls but there is no record of them having become aggressive. The reason I refer to Hitchcock’s Birds is that our old friends the corellas are back in town and have been for a few weeks. And I must admit I thought of the movie when I heard them screeching and attacking some trees along Carson Terrace adjacent to Geraldton Senior High School. They were doing a pretty good job of stripping branches bare of leaves and littering the road and footpath with shredded pieces of eucalypts, along with a substantial amount of their droppings. On one level corellas are a protected species, but they are also a declared pest and so can be managed by the appropriate authorities. Presumably this means they can be culled but at this stage I won’t risk taking my slingshot up to Maitland Park and taking aim at them. I’d like to and even as I write this piece I can hear them in the distance yelling and screaming as they wreck more havoc on the city’s trees. I know they are not native to the local environment and as such have probably displaced other birds from Champion Bay and surrounds. What the corellas find attractive about Geraldton isn’t documented. Perhaps it’s the plentiful trees and the complacency of the humans. Just as in Hitchcock’s movie, they sit menacingly looking down on us planning but not so silently waiting.